Report Parameters

Report parameters provide a means of zooming in on a particular area of focus. Report parameters are specified on the report start page through the options shown in Figure 2. Through the setting of report parameters you can:

Narrow the time ranger over which the report is run. For example you can set a start and end date (and time down the resolution of hours, minutes and seconds).

Specify a URL pattern that you wish to wish all performance transactions to match. For example, you can see the performance (and utilisation) of an individual website by specifying that web sites URL e.g. "www.google.com".

Restrict your focus to a particular network you were connected to. For example, if you wanted to see what kind of performance you were receiving on WiFi connection in an office, you could specify the IP address that was being used by your computer at that point in time.

The sections that follow provide more detail on how to use these individual parameters. If you use more than one (e.g. dates and URL patterns) reports will be generated that match all of the parameters you specify.

Specifying a Date Range

WebMeter makes it easy to quickly specify a standard date range for your reports. You can use the "radio button" options to request that reports are restricted to one of:

All activity over the last 24 hours

All activity over the last week

All activity over the last 4 weeks

Other

When you select other the "From Date" and "To Date" boxes are enabled. By clicking on these boxes a popup calendar can be used to select the start and end dates for your reports. You can edit the date text created in these boxes to modify the default hours, minutes and seconds that are generated for the dates you select.

Figure 3

Specifying URL Pattern Matching

By default WebMeter does not do any URL pattern matching. If you do want WebMeter to do some URL pattern matching you must enter a URL pattern to match in the box highlighted in Figure 4. Using URL patterns you can focus your reports on:

A set of websites which share a pattern

A single website

A set of pages which share a pattern

Pattern matching looks for the occurrence of the URL pattern you specify in all URLs within scope for the report. For example, if you were to enter "google" then the following URLs would be included in the report:

http://www.google.com

http://www.google.co.uk

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?rd=r1&p=google

Patterns are case sensitive so, for example, "Google" will match different web transactions to "google".

Figure 4

Specifying Network Address

If you use a laptop, notebook or netbook you will regularly acquire a different IP address as you move been different fixed-wire or WiFi networks. By default, WebMeter does not focus on a particular IP address from which your web transactions were issued. You may however, wish to compare performance across these various networks and WebMeter helps you do this by allowing you to specify a particular IP address to include in your reports.

To do this, use the drop down list highlighted in Figure 5 to select the relevant IP address. You then run your report, taking note of the performance figures, and run the same report for IP address with which you wish to compare performance.